NEW YORK, March 28 (UPI) — Showtime has set up a multi-platform campaign to promote the second season of its acclaimed series “The Tudors,” the U.S. cable television network said.

The first episode of the second season of the sexy historical drama starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Natalie Dormer and Peter O’Toole will air on Showtime Sunday.

It will also be available through the CBS Audience Network and on such Web sites as Yahoo, Amazon Unbox, NetFlix, MSN, TV.com, TVGuide.com, YouTube, Veoh, Gather.com, blogs and on iTunes via podcast, Showtime said.

The episode will be available via mobile phones to subscribers of Verizon Wireless on the V CAST platform, as well, and Showtime subscribers can also watch it on their affiliate Web sites such as Comcast.net, DirecTV.com and Charter.net.

“The strategy to release a full episode on digital platforms has proven to be a very effective tool for Showtime, not only increasing consumers’ exposure to premium television programs, but also to help drive subscription to the network,” Robert Hayes, senior vice president of the Showtime Digital Group, said in a statement. “This is our most ambitious multi-platform push yet to subscribers and non-subscribers and we expect to have a combined reach of over 190 million users.”

One of PRINCESS DIANA’s most famous lines is to feature in the upcoming second season of TV hit THE TUDORS after producer MICHAEL HIRST insisted on putting it in the mouth of HENRY VIII’s mistress-turned-second wife ANNE BOLEYN. Hirst was so excited when he realised Henry’s love triangle with Boleyn and his first wife Catherine of Aragon mirrored that of Prince Charles, Diana and Camilla Parker-Bowles, he insisted on making subtle links. And when Boleyn scolds Henry, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, raging, “You can’t have three people in a marriage,” Hirst admits the words are lifted straight from Diana. He tells the Los Angeles Times newspaper, “I was very naughty. I had Anne Boleyn say it because it was an extraordinarily similar situation. “I like the fact that I can put in these contemporary references, just to point out that things don’t change that much.” The second season of the hit period drama debuts on Sunday (30Mar08) in America.

The past is always more interesting than it seems. That’s the premise Michael Hirst adheres to whenever he sits down to write “The Tudors.”

The Showtime series traces the reign of the oft-married King Henry VIII of England, and as the second season begins Sunday, the monarch continues his quest to wed mistress Anne Boleyn and gain supremacy over the Roman Catholic Church in England.”It may be dry in a history book, but if you think about it, it involves people’s beliefs and passions and their whole way of life being destroyed and challenged,” said Hirst, who previously wrote the Oscar-nominated 1998 film “Elizabeth” about Henry’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I.As this season unfolds, the king realizes the extent of his power and uses it against two people close to him: his wife Anne (Natalie Dormer) and Sir Thomas More (Jeremy Northam).

“People will die, and people will live,” he said. “And people will become very wealthy and very powerful, and other people will be destroyed.”

Rhys Meyers said he can sympathize with Henry despite the monarch’s reputation as a tyrant.

“Henry’s only a king because he was anointed such . . . but you have go right through the crown, go right through the jewelry, go right through the clothes, go right through the doors of the apartment, go right through into the naked human. And you realize how vulnerable he actually is.”

Hirst, also the show’s creator and an executive producer, said the scope of a 10-episode season allows him to delve into the characters’ nuances, including Henry’s more admirable traits and some of the negative aspects of More, who was canonized in the 20th century.

In doing historical research, Hirst said he looks for “oddball moments” that people might not have seen before, such as in the first season when Henry wrestles the king of France — shirtless.

When he’s more fully dressed in the Emmy-winning costumes designed by Joan Bergin, Rhys Meyers said the wardrobe is just one of the ways he feels transformed into Henry.

“You’ve got to learn to allow the clothes to wear you as well as you wearing the clothes. And you have to walk differently. You stand differently,” he said. “It’s quite extraordinary.”

“IT’S GOOD to be King!” said Mel Brooks in “The History of the World, Part I.” It’s good to be Jonathan Rhys Meyers, too. This young actor — only 30, though acting since his teens — has hit his stride. He plays a new kind of Henry VIII in Showtime’s opulent and sexy “The Tudors,” which begins its second season Sunday. I met with Jonathan down in Manhattan’s Soho, at the trendy 60 Thompson Street hotel. He looked, head to toe, like a page from men’s Vogue. He is impossibly handsome. His features are startlingly lush; the eyes, the famous mouth. Like a matinee idol of years past — Tyrone Power, perhaps — even if Jonathan weren’t a famous actor, he’d stop any room he entered. (The Dublin native began his career playing a glam-rocker in the cult classic “Velvet Goldmine” and he exudes a slightly decadent, ambiguous rock-star glamour.) The star is kinetic, and at first, almost disconcertingly intense. He laughs, “Oh, I know it. People always say to me, you’re so jittery, you can’t sit still, you’re nervous. But I’m not nervous. I’m just a very excitable guy. I’m enthusiastic. I can’t help myself.” He says that when he made “Mission: Impossible III” with Tom Cruise, he found somebody else with a similar powerful energy. “I had a great time on that, and when Tom and I were together it was like, whoosh!, all the air in the room evaporated. He was terrific to work with because he is so committed and professional. I mean, 17 hours a day. You have to respect that.”I REMIND Jonathan that we’d met briefly once before, at the premiere of his Woody Allen thriller, “Match Point.” I hadn’t been able to talk at length with him that night. But, when I passed him at the party, I said, “Great film, great performance, but what a sociopath your character is.” Jonathan stepped back and barked, “He’s not a sociopath, he’s just a guy in a bad spot.” I didn’t pursue further niceties. So now I ask, was Henry VIII a sociopath or “just a guy in a bad spot?” Jonathan says: “Neither. He’s a megalomaniac, somebody with absolute power who has been corrupted by it, absolutely. He was a great King in many ways, and did great things. But he also did terrible things. Not just to his women, but to his people. In the matter of divorcing Catherine of Aragon and marrying Anne Boleyn, challenging the church, he gave his people no choice. Choose the Pope or the King, be excommunicated by the Pope or excommunicated by the King. And God help you if you choose the Pope! I’m trying to show how he became what he became, why he was so paranoid, why he was so ashamed. He was paranoid because everybody wanted to be King and the knives were everywhere, literally. He was ashamed because in the matter of Catherine and Anne, he knew he’d done wrong. He never doubted the legitimacy of his marriage to Catherine. He wanted Anne, period.”

JONATHAN, slender, toned, not towering in height, is a very different Henry than we’ve seen before. “I had some trepidation, when offered the role. You know, when I played Elvis, I could look in the mirror, and sort of see Elvis in myself. But Henry the VIII? So, you know, I decided I’d play it more from here,” touching the smooth plane of his semi-bare chest. “I do think we’ve sort of changed the game. When I saw photos of Eric Bana as Henry in “The Other Boleyn Girl” I thought, “Fuck! He doesn’t look that dissimilar from me. I worried a little how I’d stack up. He’s so tall; he’s got that overpowering quality. And I’ve met him. He handed me my Golden Globe for ‘Elvis.” I remember just looking way up! But this is the 21st century. You have to have a hot Henry VIII! Nobody wants to see a 300 pound man making love to a beautiful woman. Maybe on some strange Internet site, but otherwise audiences demand eye-candy all around.”

The network is already planning a third season, minus the unfortunate ladies, Anne and Catherine, who meet their respective ends this year. Jonathan says, “I hope season three focuses on the rebellion in Scotland, where you see Henry fight for a change.” I wondered if the series would touch on the pathetic Katherine Howard, the second wife to lose her head? Jonathan couldn’t say, but did remark that Mistress Howard “absolutely deserved to be beheaded. Anne Boleyn was executed because there was no other way to get out of that. She couldn’t give him a son and that was the reason for the marriage. But Katherine Howard earned her beheading. She was a little nymphomaniac. She had over one hundred lovers in the palace!” Now, I begged to differ with Jonathan; she’d had a number of indiscreet affairs before and, alas, during her marriage to Henry, but a “nympho” a “hundred lovers?” The actor was adamant and I let it go — you don’t argue with Jonathan Rhys Meyers! He did soften slightly, “Well, she was very young and silly, the poor thing had no concept of ‘wed and bed’ — she didn’t see she was doing anything wrong, Henry being rather gross by then.” Jonathan spoke glowingly of Maria Doyle Kennedy, who plays Catherine, and infuses her every moment with dignity and strength, “Isn’t she magnificent?!” he exclaimed. And of the delectable Natalie Dormer, as Anne, he insists, “season two belongs to her. She owns it; she plays it like a harp and broke down walls with this performance.”

On the bigscreen, Jonathan will soon be seen in “The Children of Hunag Shi,” in which he plays a reporter covering the infamous Japanese occupation of China in 1937. And then comes “Mandrake,” based on the comicbook character, Mandrake the Magician.

Natalie Dormer, who plays Anne, found it easy to see her as a contemporary. She says there were strong likenesses between her character and a more recent British royal beauty: Diana, Princess of Wales.

“They were both incredibly image-conscious,” says Dormer, 26, who was sitting in a dressing room, wearing a 16th-century-style ivory dress. “Anne Boleyn shook up the court in an aesthetic way.”

Just like Diana, who used glamour to court the news media, Dormer says, Anne made it clear that she was bringing “a certain je ne sais quoi, a sophistication” to the court. So far, the historical Anne and the Showtime Anne have not noticeably diverged. (She really did contract and survive what was known as the sweating sickness.) But anything can happen.

Anne will do historically accurate things, like marrying Henry, giving birth to a daughter (the future Elizabeth I), losing her husband to Jane Seymour and losing her head to the executioner. The season will also bring Thomas More’s fall from grace, which really occurred.

Just the other day Hirst swore that there would be no further historical adjustments this season, at least nothing significant that he could think of.

Oh, except the plot to kill Anne Boleyn. He invented that to illustrate how much the English people hated her.

Natalie Dormer thinks so. The England native plays the doomed mistress and queen in “The Tudors,” returning for a second season Sunday at 9 p.m. on Showtime.

“It would be very easy for Anne Boleyn to be a two-dimensional, Machiavellian, bad, other woman,” Dormer said.“In season two, she really comes through as a pure light. She’s an incredibly loving human being with lots of gusto and fire. There’s a lot of love and faith in her. She has a strong maternal love, which I found incredibly interesting to play. My greatest hope, over the course of season two, is that the audience finds themselves sympathizing and empathizing with Anne and rooting for her. So at the end you are standing next to her, shoulder to shoulder.”As everyone knows, things did not end well for Queen Anne. King Henry VIII (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) assumed secular authority over the Catholic clerics in England so that he could divorce Katherine of Aragon (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and marry Anne.Anne’s failure to give the king a son led to her downfall. Accused of adultery, she was beheaded in 1536.“The sheer extremity of what she goes through gets more and more intense as the season goes on,” said Dormer. “There are horrific physical and mental trials. Increasingly, she’s the victim of these cruel circumstances.”Dormer read five biographies to prepare for the role.“I’m a bit of a history buff. I love my history,” she said. “But you have to balance that you are not playing in a historical documentary. (Creator and executive producer) Michael Hirst’s script was my bible.”

How was it for Dormer to play a character who she knows is doomed?

“You’re so intensely playing the moment, you don’t see the horizon,” she said. “The pleasure comes from the journey.”

Dormer and Rhys Meyers’ love scenes this season have already garnered attention. The couple were on the cover of a recent TV Guide with the headline “How Far Can TV Go?”

“The intense physical attraction Henry and Anne felt for each other is paramount to the plot,” Dormer said.

Of her revealing scenes, she added, “I think actresses have a responsibility to protect the sisterhood. It is not something you can be flippant about. You wouldn’t do it unless you had given it weighty consideration, which I have.”

The actress hopes her next role is something on the other end of the spectrum – something, say, that involves T-shirts, jeans and running. But she also would relish the opportunity to return to this pivotal time in British history.

“ ‘The Tudors’ is about human existence. The themes are timeless – love, sex, faith, economy, war. That big list never changes. Especially in the world we live in now.”